Reactive localisation of an odour source by a learning mobile robot

Abstract

The goal of this work was to enable a mobile robot to navigate autonomously towards a stationary odour source with the help of a sense of smell. Two electronic noses, each containing a set of gas sensors, mounted on top of a Koala mobile robot were used for detection of the odour. The sensing strategy used for data collection was investigated in order to reduce the influence of air turbulences on the sample handling process. Then a multi-layer artificial neural network was used to learn both the direction to the source and the required turning speed of the robot. An experimental validation was carried out to evaluate the performance of the complete system.